SNES Classic Hardware Breakdown Reveals That It Uses The Same Hardware As NES Classic

That explains why the NES Classic Mini was discontinued…

The NES Classic Mini was absurdly overpowered for its job- the hardware inside the box, meant to perfectly emulate Nintendo’s 8-bit console, was so powerful that it could realistically emulate games from well beyond the NES console era.

And it looks like Nintendo has leveraged that fact with the SNES Classic Mini- because it is using identical hardware under the hood as last year’s unexpectedly popular NES Mini. Digital Foundry discovered this in their technical analysis of the console, noting that the system comes with an Allwinner R16 SoC chip with four ARM Cortex A7s, combined with an ARM Mali 400 MP2 GPU, a 256MB DDR3 module, and 512MB of NAND storage. All of this is actually too powerful even for an SNES- so there is actually a possibility we see this same hardware in a hypothetical N64 Classic Mini, should that ever pan out.

The SNES Classic Mini launches tomorrow- it will cost $80, and it will come with over 20 of the SNES’s finest games (many regarded as some of the greatest games ever made), including the previously unreleased Star Fox 2.